


an open book with a torn-out page

by evocates



Category: 18th & 19th Century CE RPF, Hamilton - Miranda, Hamilton - Miranda (Broadway Cast) RPF, Historical RPF
Genre: (based on race instead of gender), (on the parts of every single participant), Body Dysphoria, Bodyswap, Consent Issues, Dehumanization, Extremely Dubious Consent, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Non-Consensual Voyeurism, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, RPF, Racism, Racist Language, Time Travel, let's put it this way: this fic gives 'fever' a good run for its money, please take great caution when reading
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-12 21:38:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10499961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evocates/pseuds/evocates
Summary: He woke to stare at numbers in a colour he had never before imagined, and a sound impossible to describe with the words owed to him by six languages.A hand reached out and dropped, heavy, upon the strange white box that was emitting that noise. The black square on top disappeared – sank down. He felt the familiar stretch of muscles waking and spine straightening.Then, and only then, did Jefferson realise that the hand was his own.It was a shade of darkness that he knew far too well.Thomas Jefferson propelled into a body that was not his own. There are truths that should be self-evident, but the light of the sun changed as centuries past.James Madison, in the aftermath.(Jefferson/Madison time/body displacement fic with added RPF. Please, please note the tags and the warnings within.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dawittiest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawittiest/gifts).



> For the March fightbackfic auction, dawittiest asked for a Jefferson/Madison fic in which Jefferson is time-displaced into modernity and which involves both race and sexuality issues. She really liked my last fic in which I ran away with the prompt, and so I did it again.
> 
>  **Warnings:** RPF; slavery; period-typical homophobia and racism with their historically-accurate terminology and justifications directly depicted; massive disassociation and racially-based body dysphoria; and Jefferson and Madison being, for once, based upon their historical appearances instead of their _Hamilton_ ones. They are still not portrayed in any way resembling good people. Also depiction of consensual intimacy and sex between two people from the perspective of a very non-consensual voyeur who later joined in. Probably plenty of other things impossible to warn properly.
> 
> This fic is officially more fucked up than _a fever of the mad_. So once more, **if anything discomfits, triggers, or makes you feel anything you don’t want to when participating in fandom, please press the back button immediately.** I think it’s pretty clear by now that I don’t write nice fics. Especially not for these two.

_Pitch black, pale blue,_  
_It was a stained-glass_  
_Variation of the truth,_  
_And I felt empty-handed._  
      _Neptune_ , Sleeping at Last

He woke to stare at numbers in a colour he had never before imagined, and a sound impossible to describe with the words owed to him by six languages.

A hand reached out and dropped, heavy, upon the strange white box that was emitting that noise. The black square on top disappeared– _sank down_. He felt the familiar stretch of muscles waking and spine straightening.

Then, and only then, did Jefferson realise that the hand was his own.

It was a shade of darkness that he knew far too well. Knew it from how it spread, like mud or mould crawling on bread, over a woman’s body, staying the same even on the creases of her over-large black eyes. 

The very first time he met Betty Hemings on John Wayles’s couch, her fingers clenched tight around a saucer and cup. The clinking of porcelain as she trembled going politely ignored. The angle of Martha’s head as she averted her eyes.

 _Mulatto_ , his mind supplied. _Half-breed_ , it added. The product of a union left unsanctified by God. Named after a mule but without the beast’s best characteristic; mixed-bloods left with the ability to spread their monstrosity with terrible virility.

His lungs wished to seize but expanded instead.

Strands of tightly-wound hair, a stubborn trait that took at least three generations to be rid of, falling into his eyes. Jefferson knew his own hair to be red; the colour of old, old rust.

The ache of calves and thighs. Chill on the soles. The absence of the usual creak of that one floorboard beside the bed; his usual herald of wakefulness. 

He had never noticed how footsteps could echo through the bones until now; now when the steps being taken were not his own.

This was not his body. Yet he still saw what it saw.

Mirror, circled by a blue too dark for painted wood or stained glass. It glinted dull underneath a light that shone without need of fire; a light that came on by with a brush of a hand and a strange sound like the click of a tongue. Tiles below that squeaked with every step, even colder to the skin than wood. Gleaming silver tap on top of a ceramic basin set against the wall that gave water with a turn of the wrist with no nearby pump in sight. 

Silence where there should be the sound of water rushing.

The lungs he could still feel breathed deep. Sudden shocking cold on the hands and face, far colder than the water in the basin he kept on his nightstand. A body that was not his but which made movements that were still so familiar.

 _That face_.

Curls. Heavy shock of them, so long that they touched the jaw. A straight, thin nose; not wide with flared nostrils like most Negroes. Mouth with teeth whiter than most Congressmen, the sign of wealth that no one with such skin should even think of owning, framed by lips so thick they remained so even in the midst of a wide yawn. Fingers rubbing through strands; fingers that felt smooth, like a house’s slave.

But the shoulders were too broad, the muscles too corded. No fool would keep a Negro so obviously strong in the house. It was courting danger. 

Dolley would be horrified. Dolley would be terrified.

“Too damned early in the morning.”

A voice richer and deeper than his own, rampaging through lungs and throat and invading the ears. No, not the ears. The relief that flooded him as alien nails scraped over the curve of an ear was not his own.

This was not his body. Yet he still felt what it felt.

 _Surely this is a dream_ , his mind told him. A protest as weak as the thin paper of a palimpsest. Jefferson knew too well his head’s habits; he was not a man for night-time fantasies. He usually exhausted his faculties so much in the day that his mind would not continue to work while he slept. 

Bright sunshine pouring through frosted panes above the head that was both his and not his. He had always envied Madison for the dreams he had while he slept, for he seemed to gain his greatest ideas then.

Air rushed into lungs that were not his own. Jefferson had enough humility to realise that imaginings as rich and elaborate as this were beyond him. Not the body – it was common enough – but all that surrounded it. Even this odd green stick with white bristles on the tip that those dark hands were spreading some sort of ointment onto.

Flood of mint in the mouth. Ache of the neck. Muscles of the shoulders straining. Bright green stark-framed by thick lips. A twinge along the line of bones. The slap of feet on tiles.

First full glimpse: a body like Michelangelo’s _David_ , carved not out of pale marble but sculpted from dirt-brown stone.

A scream grew in his throat, spreading slow like cancer.

But Jefferson could not make a sound.

***

It was a cold morning. Fifty-nine point six Fahrenheit precisely. It had rained the night before, while he slept.

Philadelphia spread itself in its grey ugliness outside the hotel room’s window. Below, a lone carriage passed by, the horse’s hooves kicking up mud to stain its white-footed legs. Above, the skies sprawled wide, heavy clouds so far out of reach of the hopelessly-grasping hands of short, squat buildings.

Within the room, it was dark; dawn was barely here. Jefferson removed his flint from his tinderbox, striking it against the wick of his candle. It took several minutes, a few tries, before flames began to lick at the frayed threads, coloured a shivering orange that sent shadows flickering against the wall. The air filled with the stench of smoke. Jefferson breathed it in deep, and tasted wax on his tongue.

A heavy weight he knew.

He looked down at his own hands. Pale and long-fingered, with splotches of ink from last night’s writing of letters that he had not bothered to clean before bed. He had stopped bothering with such chores after Martha had died. There was no one in his bed who required such courtesies.

The basin, filled with water, called to him. From under the bed he could hear the cries of the chamber-pot. Jefferson had a set series of tasks that had not changed for years; not even when he gained the position of Vice-President and made the necessary move to Philadelphia.

His fingers itched for the tobacco he grew and had never smoked in his life.

There was a knock on the door. Jefferson jerked, his eyes going automatically to the clock on the wall. The cuckoo was well-hidden in its cage; it was seven minutes to seven in the morning. An hour early for breakfast.

“Mister Jefferson, sir?” a voice called out. “Mister Madison is here.”

Perhaps it was the name, so well-worn on his tongue and so familiar. Perhaps it was that voice, sweet in its own way and which he had heard in so many different pitches. But he saw, suddenly, the flash of near-black on dirt-brown; two hands entwined. 

Jefferson looked down at his own hand, flexing the fingers just to see them move. Then he closed his eyes. He knew his mind’s habits well.

“Show him to the sitting room, Sally,” he said, each syllable following the beat of nails sinking into the flesh of his own palm. There was one too few, so he continued, “We’ll take breakfast there.” 

Now there were too many. His skin screamed from the unaccustomed pain. Jefferson flexed his bones again.

“Of course, sir,” Sally said. Her voice had not changed. Was that barest note of resentment merely his imagination, or had his sleep managed to sharpen his ears?

It must be the former; he treated his slaves far too well for them to harbour any hatred against him. They were never beaten, and, no matter how high his debts mounted, they stayed fed and unworried about the household accounts. Sally in particular had been a house slave the whole of her life, her hands untouched by roughness and even given the privilege of being the personal maid to Jefferson’s daughters. She had plenty.  
__  
Except for relief from the chains.  
_  
_ The voice was deeper than his own, familiar in ways that went beyond a single night. Blood beaded beneath his nails. He dipped his hands into the basin, letting the lukewarm water lap on his skin. The clear water stained to pink. He bowed his head, and splashed his face with it. 

His skin crawled with the thought of washing himself with the traces of his own blood. But it did not flake off; did not peel away to reveal an imposter beneath. The heart roaring within the cage of his ribs remained entirely his own. The shallow breaths that shuddered in and out of his throat were his, too.

In the silvered oval mirror that hung on a nail above the basin, he saw a pale face freckled by the sun. Rust-red hair fell over the cheeks. Light eyes stared at him, refracted a thousand times by the polished brass vines that encircled the mirror. 

Outside, a horse neighed, loud and frightened. Shouts rang out through the streets as the town stirred awake. The grey skies had brightened enough that the sunlight that came through his windows was enough to drown out the meagre light of the candle.

If Jefferson was a man for superstition, he would believe that ghosts skittered back into the shadowed corners of the world when morning came.

But he was a man of science. So when he held out his arm and saw brown superimposed over white in his mind’s eye, he was not surprised.

He sank his hands into the water. He scratched at skin until the pink darkened into red.

***

Numbers and words forming themselves into dates on a small, rectangular screen that lit up when a button was pressed. Miraculous machines shaped like the boxes drawn by children’s hands, large enough to carry men and women and far faster than horses. Even bigger boxes, far larger than the size of a poor man’s hut, that ran by themselves, with air that blew warm from vents yet without any sign of fire; with a voice that called names he half-recognised but no visible throat from which that voice could escape.

Wonders that threatened to buoy him high above to the clouds, but he was trapped there, wrapped in a dirt-brown body he could not escape from. Clues that fell into his hands and yet the finished puzzle had so much depth that the frame of words his scrabbling half-formed hands had plucked from his mind could barely touch it. 

_New York City, 2016_. _Richard Rodgers Theatre_.

A Negro was sitting in front of him with his brows furrowed. His hand, large and broad in a way that would make Dolley shudder just to look at, was upon this body’s knee. It was warm.

Jefferson tried to rear back. In a way that he was slow-growing used to, the body did not respond.

“You alright?”

English coiled far too easily around a tongue that God obviously had not made for its shapes. Jefferson felt non-existent breath knocked out of non-existent lungs.

This surprised him the most. More than the personalised moving boxes – _cars_ , a laughing whisper for which he did not wish to find the source of had whispered in his mind – or the larger public ones – _trains_ – or the lights or the buildings that surely reached higher than the Tower of Babel had done.

“Sorry, I must’ve dozed off.” Movement of lips and tongue over teeth as the body spoke. Reverberations down to the bones in a way Jefferson was intimately familiar with, but without the usual taste of the words. “Must’ve been real tired.”

Even English itself had changed. Fluency turned alien because of sudden swiftness and efficiency. The words cut sharp and slurred blurred both; stark colours painted by words streaked by a hand muddying the shades and clouding the lines.

“I’d apologise but I don’t think you want me to,” the Negro said. The smile on his face was one that Jefferson had never before seen shaped upon such thick lips. The shine of his eyes, caught by the too-white light coming from overhead – _fluorescent_ – had brilliance and depth unfitting to his dark, dark skin. 

Rumbling at the base of a chest. Stretch of skin on the neck. Ache of the shoulders from the weight of a head. Laughter as dark and rich as the colour of those strands, echoing within and around him as his mind shrieked.

Frequently, he wished that his mind could be divorced from his body so that he could work more without giving into his body’s exhaustions. Now he had been given his desire and yet it was nothing like what he had ever wished for. 

His head spun. The world remained steady. More contradictions and impossibilities made by his mind into words both formless and not. None of which he could even grope at to feel the shape of now that he had no hands.

Circles and circles his mind went into like it had never done before.

“C’mon Oak,” the bone-shaking voice said. How strange it was to feel lips stretch and curve when one did not feel at all like smiling. “Don’t get so full of yourself.”

Hands. Large and strong and dark, cupping his face. Eyes wide and even darker, so close. A heartbeat that thundered into life like the beating of excited horses’ hooves on dirt, and yet so different. 

Jefferson’s breath would have hitched and he would have screamed if he had any control over this pair of lungs and this throat at all.

“How’s this for being full of myself?”

Noses brushing together. Some strange familiarity in the touch of lips, twisting deep inside a throat he no longer had as rough beard hairs rubbed over his own. He had ever only been clean-shaven. He had never been touched like this: corded strength that pushed him back into a wide piece of furniture that threatened to swallow him – _a couch, c’mon, you know what a couch is._

 __The thighs that encircled this pair of hips were too thick. The body that loomed over this body was too broad. Jefferson wanted to be afraid, but the brilliance of the smile turned towards him wrenched that fear into something even more terrifying instead.

Animals did not smile, but bared their teeth in threat. He tried to hold onto that thought.

“So whaddya think?” the Negro – _Oak, you know his name is Oak, I’ve already said it_ – said, his hand sinking into this body’s hair and tugging on it. “Do I make for a good Prince Charming?”

“Only an idiot tries to wake up someone who is already awake, asshole,” the body said, another laugh rumbling through its bones. Incongruous to the insult was this too: the slow splaying of its brown hand upon ebony skin, nails sliding light over the rough curls. “Some Prince Charming you make.”

“I dunno,” Oak – Jefferson shouldn’t use his name, he _shouldn’t_ , and yet, _yet_ this bodiless breathlessness – shrugged, leaning even closer until the body’s vision was taken up entirely by his face and his lips were pressed against a temple. “Magical kisses are supposed to chase away sleepiness, aren’t they?”

“That’s not how things work,” the body protested.

“If I say that’s how they work, that’s how they work.” Fingers tapping over a mouth. Fingers tugging over a cheek, pulling at the skin. Fingers twining around a coiled strand, tugging out a yelp out of the body’s throat.

There were intimacies that should be taken only in the bedroom. There were intimacies allowed only between a man and his wife in a union blessed by God. The finger hovering in front of the body’s eyes darted away as the body’s teeth tried to bite at it. There were intimacies that should not ever be imagined for bodies that were too human-shaped for them.

This savagery on his ghost-tongue was like honey, smooth-sliding and sweet. No poison should ever go down so easily.

Another ghost; one with a voice bright and piercing: “Places in thirty!”

“We gotta go,” the body said. Its fist hit a broad shoulder. “Get dressed and everything. So get off and everything.” 

Oak caught the wrist, and turned his head. The smack of his kiss echoed and echoed in Jefferson’s mind.

“One last thing,” Oak grinned. He leaned in.

Their chests pressed against each other. Corded muscle against corded muscle. The body’s fingers bunching over thin cloth. 

It should be unnatural. Men with their missing rib needed women, with one extra, to fill its space. But their ribs slotted up against each other and their hearts beat in some strange staccato tandem, and there was no gaping space in-between like there should have been.

Against the background of their gasping chuckles, Jefferson could hear the distorted sound of glass breaking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pieter Camper and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire were three pseudo-scientists who proposed the idea of ‘craniometry’, in which the shape of the skull was supposed to determine the superiority of one race over another. They all lived and worked at around the same time as Jefferson.
> 
> The whole idea of Jefferson being ghosts in inspired by both Wole Soyinka’s works and my own upbringing. White people seem to be called ‘ghosts’ by several non-white cultures. The more you know. 
> 
> It gets even worse from here.


	2. Chapter 2

_Pitch black, pale blue,_  
 _These wild oceans_  
 _Shake what's left of me loose_  
 _Just to hear me cry mercy._  
      _Neptune,_ Sleeping at Last

A touch on his elbow. Fingers small and pale, framed by a billow of white shirtsleeve set into stark white by the black coat that covers it. 

“Sir, are you alright?”

Three colours partitioning hand and wrist and arm. Madison was a man of neat, clean lines. Brown eyes set in a face with cleanly defined nose and lips, the former framed by slight shadows and the latter pinker and fuller than the skin around them. Jefferson had never seen him without the cravat that divided his jaw from his neck. The places where gaze was allowed, and where it was not.

A smile should be natural in this man’s presence. But the stretch of his lips recalled that alien voice again, murmuring _rubber_ in his mind. 

Jefferson did not know what rubber was.

“I have stayed up too late last night reading again.” Lies should not come easier than tearing his eyes away from the glimpse of neck that peeked through Madison’s cravat. “There is nothing that is the matter.”

“Will you grant me the honour of knowing what it is that you’ve read?” Madison asked, cocking his head. 

It was rare that Madison asked such a thing of him. Colours burst, bright and sudden, within his ribs, and were immediately dulled by the dark cloud of a lie.

“Only what we have already discussed,” Jefferson said. His skin ached beneath his coat and shirtsleeve when Madison drew his hand away. “Camper and Saint-Hillaire, primarily.”

Madison quirked an eyebrow at him, his lips tugging upwards at the side. “I find it difficult to believe that you will stay up all night studying theories that you already have found flaws in, sir.”

Taking a seat behind the reading desk where Sally had set out breakfast, Jefferson spread his hands out, careful to not allow them even an inch too close to Madison’s body. “You know full well, sir, that we can only progress further when we have fully understood the errors of present knowledge.” 

“With that, I have to disagree,” Madison said. His pale hands spread the white napkin over his lap. Jefferson forced his eyes to not linger on the elegant shape of the fingers. “Copernicus did not know that the geocentric theory was wrong when he was struck by the genius of heliocentrism.”

_Surely he must have had a precise idea of the various flaws of the calculations of his day_ , Jefferson meant to say. But what tripped out was: “The movement of the bodies out beyond the sky seemed far less a mystery than that of our own.”

Hand pausing in the midst of reaching for a freshly-bought roll, Madison cocked his head. “Is that the reason why you revisited craniometry?”

A flash at the corner of his eye: two hands entwined, both broad with prominent knuckles; one brown, the other far darker. Dirt that clung to his skin no matter how deep the welts his nails had left. 

“We know from science that when separate species breed, their children are infertile,” Jefferson said, looking down at the dark green cloth spread beneath the plates. A gift from Dolley, months ago. “The children of two races do not suffer from the same affliction.”

“It is a complex question indeed,” Madison said. He broke the bread. His eyes, Jefferson realised, were barely a shade darker than that body’s skin. “How much of a white man’s blood should a mulatto have before it can be considered worthy of proper society?”

A dead child in Sally’s arms. Her tears soaking into its straight, red-streaked hair. Blank, unseeing eyes the same colour as Patsy’s when she was born.

Sally herself, who looked so much like Martha when the sunlight caressed her skin in just the right way.

“How much do you think they should have?” Jefferson said, managing, barely, to keep his voice steady.

Madison popped the bread into his mouth, and chewed. “This is not my area of expertise,” he said, and licked the tips of his fingers where they had touched the butter.

Jefferson averted his eyes to his plate. But within the white ceramic he could see those tangled fingers again, dark skin on dark striking even when he closed his eyes. Madison was right: blackness was a filth that could not be erased, could only be diluted but the traces would always remain like a stain upon the soul of those that God had marked to be the lowly of the world.

Yet he remembered that the apple of Eden was said to be blood red, gleaming underneath the eternally cloudless skies that hovered above paradise. A fruit that looked better than any other. When Eve first sank her teeth into the apple, her mind was surely not on her sin, but the sweetness that burst on her tongue. A savage thing that tore through her with a burst of flavours that was better than anything she had ever tasted. One with a sharpness that hooked onto something within her and dragged out underneath that bright sunlight; something that should not have ever existed. A sharpness made into labour pains for herself, for all of her daughters. 

He remembered the way Sally had screamed with that child with the red hair.

Eve, made from a single rib. Jefferson’s own chest throbbed, as if the rib that he had been missing his entire life was growing within that empty space. Crossing over to pierce his heart and lungs until he began to bleed.

Or perhaps he already had.

“Do you think, sir,” he lifted his head to finally meet Madison’s eyes, “that it is mine?”

Madison smiled. It curved up the sides of his eyes; a rare occurrence. He leaned forward, fingers linking before he set his head atop of them. 

“Not at all, sir,” he said. “Only that you have more experience than I do.”

Jefferson picked up a roll. Madison knew about the predilections of many Southern plantation masters, including Jefferson, even if he had never shared in their habits. This, Jefferson knew, was not a salt to rub upon the weeping wounds of his own flaws.

“My apologies if I have offended you,” Madison said when Jefferson did not speak. He held out a hand. 

It was a small hand. Made smaller by the richness and fullness of the shirt’s cuff that framed it. The sunlight from the window cast every single finger into sharp relief.

When Jefferson took the limb, the skin was cool. He shook it firmly, and did not linger on just how much his hand dwarfed Madison’s. He did not think of its paleness, and how it compared to the hands of others he had held in his own.

They finished breaking their fast in silence. As Madison lifted the napkin to his lips, Jefferson leaned back, and waved a hand.

Sally came from where she always waited at the corner and picked up their dishes. She took them away.

***

Purple velvet that shimmered underneath even the dim lights. Weight and heft in every inch of cloth that shivered with the stench of money. The colour of disavowed royalty; of those with skin so pale and blood so blue that they seemed eternally cold.

It set off the body’s brown skin beautifully, brightening dirt with the glitters of fools’ gold.

This is not his body. But under searing hot lights, in front of over a thousand pairs of eyes, it answered to his name.

“Daveed.”

He was dressed in greys and whites and blues, and held his spine straight in a way that had Jefferson’s breath hitching the first time the body’s eyes gave him the sight. But surely, surely, the plain colours were still bright for the man whose name he carried on stage; the man who refused shades.

Warm fingers that were smooth– without the roughness of bark, without the calluses of a field slave like all those of his stature and colour Jefferson knew – tangled with the body’s. His lips were dry and hot as he pressed them against the back of a too-wide, ungloved hand. 

Reminders upon reminders in insidious whispers had seared this man’s name into Jefferson’s now-ghost mind. He was surely too dark to fit the bark of the tree that was his namesake, but his shoulders were broad enough to suit.

Oak asked, “You wanna tell me what’s up?”

The splay of his shirtsleeves framed his wrist and set the thickness of it into sharp relief.

“I…” A bob of a throat. A shaky cough. “I… God, you’re going to think that I’m crazy.”

_Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain_. Still, what was one more sin when compared to the great glaring one of his very existence? 

“Think I’ve seen ‘nough crazy around here for me to take whatever you throw at me, Daveed,” Oak said. He tugged on one of the body’s curls; the curls he had loosened when he took on Jefferson’s name.

Jefferson had always taken care to be seen in public in a wig, powdered carefully such that strands of grey showed. It fitted much better with his poor men’s clothes and hunched posture than the rich red of his actual colour.

“Somehow, I doubt that,” the body said. Its fingers squeezed Oak’s tighter, and dragged the other hand through its curls. “Look… it’s just weird, alright? I haven’t any kind of explanation for it.”

“Just tell me what’s happening,” Oak said. 

The body did not speak for long moments. There was no silence, but the singing that filled the air – voices that came from beyond the heavy curtains giving sound to words that Jefferson half-recognised – but was not nearly enough distraction. 

When she had been alive, Martha used to sit in front of him, her knee on the ground and her long, pale fingers – almost the shade of the ivory of their piano – resting upon his wrists. She had patience enough for a thousand rivers then, all of her usual pertness fading away as she waited for him to tell her all that bothered him.

Her eyes were brown, too, but of a completely different shade. But the light of her gaze – never fading from his memory despite the long years that had passed since she last breathed – was identical to Oak’s right now. 

No, not identical. _Almost_ identical. Jefferson could not tell the minute differences, could not put them into the words that he had used to frame himself his entire life. But they existed. He knew they did.

“You know how it feels like when you realise someone is watching you when you don’t expect it?” If Jefferson could jerk, he would have, at the moment. “Some kinda prickling at the back of your neck?”

Depth and resonance in that voice that rocked all down to the body’s bones, as if searching for where Jefferson was unwillingly seated to rip him out and set him dangling, rootless, amidst this strange world. 

Slide of tongue over lips. 

“Yeah,” Oak said. “’Course I have.”

They laughed together then, as if in some kind of private joke. Oak leaned forward.

The crook of his smile was one that Madison had never shown. The touch of his fingers on the body’s face was too intimate for Madison’s reserve. His skittering breath on the body’s jaw was too hot for Madison’s cold, sickly body.

“That’s pretty much what I’ve been feeling the whole day,” the body confessed. “Except it’s somehow all over my body. Like…” A breath that shuddered through lines and crawled down the spine. “Like I’ve got ants all over my skin.”

A ghost without form and yet still whole. With every word, Jefferson felt whatever self he had gathered here splintering back into grains of sand, falling between the fingers of his shapeless, formless, helpless hands. Hands named so by sheer will, but meaning nothing at all. 

“Huh?”

“I don’t know,” the body said. The back of Oak’s neck was very warm under his hand. “Probably just some weird stage fright. Nothing to worry ‘bout, really.”

Oak’s lips parted. His head tilted to the side.

A clearing throat, coming from the right. The sweep of hair over skin. Chill settling into fingers suddenly abandoned.

“You guys gotta go out in like thirty seconds,” a cheerful voice informed. “Just thought I’d tell you.”

There, standing at the edge of the body’s sight, was a man whose skin glimmered like new-starched cotton under the slices of light from the stage. Jefferson reached for the body’s lungs, willing it to seize, but he received a laugh instead.

“How long have you been standing there, Groff?”

“Long enough to see you two being incredibly sappy,” the white man ( _his name is Groff, I thought I wouldn’t have to remind you about this one_ ) said. He walked forward. His hands lifted, and came down.

White on purple velvet. White on grey cotton-silk. Mere skin on cloth, perfectly natural.

Maybe that voice that had pierced into his ghost-mind had taken shape. Maybe it was the hands themselves that reached deep within to find the grains of him, finding his ghost-eyes with unerring accuracy and twisting, _twisting_.

No cloth, no skin. Only muscles and bones and veins. Deep red with slices of stark white. White like bleached cloth; white like shirtsleeves. The body’s heart beating loud in his ghost-ears. Three hearts, beating a staccato rhythm. Every thrum making veins bulge. A mosaic of crisscrossing reds, almost all the same.

But Jefferson had always known that the colour of blood was the same. The threads of muscle of a skinned vole ran in the same directions as that of a man’s flayed back.

Skin and cloth folded back slow, layer by layer. The white of shirtsleeves setting the darkness of skin into sharp relief.

“But you gotta go now,” Groff was saying. His teeth glinted with his grin, framed by thin, pink lips. “You can continue being sappy later.”

Jefferson watched the muscles of his arms working as he shoved. His ivory skin luminescent, pearlescent, underneath the lights. Shimmering like far-off stars.

The body’s bones were trembling again with the sound of its laugh. “Like we need your permission for that,” it said.

He tried to keep his ghost-eyes upon the white man’s figure.

But the darkness swallowed Jonathan Groff whole, and left no trace behind to cling on to.

***

Ink stains on Hamilton’s white cuffs. Too-tight breeches that were surely stuffed with bags of sand or cotton to make them bulge so. Jefferson watched the man chase after the President, practically dogging his heels, already whispering under his breath.

Once, he had suspected Hamilton to be Washington’s son. Now, watching as Washington closed his fingers around Hamilton’s elbow to lead him to his office, Jefferson wondered if the relationship was something else entirely. 

The curve of Washington’s fingers was somehow similar to those dark ones at the corner of his vision. Like claws, but gentler. Tangled.

“Secretary Jefferson.”

“Congressman Madison,” Jefferson inclined his head in return, but did not make the effort to stand. Madison’s neck did not need the extra strain. “Is something the matter?”

“Only that Mrs Madison has barred me from our home as she is having some of the Congressmen’s ladies over for dinner,” Madison said. There was the smallest smile tugging at the edge of his mouth; an expression always twinned with any mention of his wife. “May I avail myself of your wonderful library?”

Warmth burst into being in Jefferson’s chest, as slow and sudden as the blossoming of Martha’s roses in Virginian spring, all those years ago. Thorns that grew sharp and pierced deep, harvesting heart’s blood for their blooms. 

“This is a rare occurrence,” Jefferson said; an excuse solid and rock-like enough to press upon his own chest such that the vines and thorns would not slip out of his throat. “How am I to refuse?”

“You might prefer to be alone, sir,” Madison replied promptly. He turned his body halfway, nodding towards the doorway where Hamilton and the President had disappeared from. “Especially after the… discussion.”

Jefferson glanced at the table. The Quakers’ petition still rested there, Franklin’s signature bright and bold; the largest on the list. He shook his head and declared, “Nothing that man said will ever bother me.”

Did he mean Franklin or Hamilton? He did not know.

Standing up, he reached for his cane.

A flash of an image behind his eyes: a flight of stairs below him, and whirring silver-tipped black caught in mid-air. _I can’t believe that we are free_. Wheels moving without squeaks. Wheels that moved by the strength and sweat of those below him.

He tucked the cane under his arm, and turned back to Madison. “Shall we, sir?”

“At your pace,” Madison nodded again.

Jimmy was waiting for them outside, back straight and head lowered. Underneath the weak Philadelphia sun, his skin could almost pass as merely tanned, like the skin of Irish bondsmen. Jefferson turned his head away. He waited until Madison had entered the carriage before he followed him, sitting with his back to Jimmy as always because Madison would be dizzied with the carriage moving backwards from where he was facing.

They sat in silence for long moments. Jefferson had long appreciated that Madison was a man who did not feel the need to fill the silence with needless chatter, but now his skin itched. Like there were ants beneath, biting in time to the beat of the horses’ hooves beneath their feet.

“Desperate, righteous hate.”

Jefferson’s head jerked upwards. Madison tilted his, brown eyes resting on Jefferson. “Those were your words, were they not?”

“They were,” Jefferson nodded. He leaned back against the wall of the carriage, gripping his cane lightly and placing it on top of his knees. “If all men are created equal, sir, then how could they not begrudge being deprived of their freedom?”

He treated his slaves well, and so they truly had no reason to complain. He knew, too, that Madison was kind towards his slaves. But not all were so lucky, and they could not enact a law that only allowed slaves of kindly masters, masters intelligent enough to understand that obedience came easier from gratitude than fear, to go free.

Laws, and principles, must by their very natures apply to all.

“There have been slaves throughout history,” Madison murmured. His body had mirrored Jefferson’s position, reversed, and his fingers were tapping on his knee. “It is well-known enough that from the Roman times men have taken ill to chains.”

Turning his head, Jefferson stared out of the window. Men and women walked upon the cobblestones, their bodies almost full-covered by cloth. As they passed the President’s House at the intersection of Sixth and High streets, he could see a row of half-naked bodies, the darkness of their skin swallowing the sunlight. The collars and cuffs and chains on their necks, ankles, and wrists glinted with cruel delight.

Recaptured slaves. Washington’s law. Jefferson’s lips twisted.

He remembered a different street.

“What,” he heard himself say, “do you think history will make of us one day?”

“Sir?” 

“We have delayed any discussion to the compromise to be made in 1808,” Jefferson said. “Though I doubt that much will be decided then, this state of affairs can only ever be prolonged, and not sustained.”

Floating above the cobblestones, he could see streets paved with a material he knew to be asphalt but little else; streets where men and women walked together in almost the same ways as they did now. Except none were chained, and the colours of their skin was proudly exposed by clothing that barely covered their bodies. 

He reached up a hand to his hair. When his fingers came back streaked white, when no curls floated in front of his eyes, he was surprised by how his own throat seized.

Madison still hadn’t said a word. Jefferson turned back towards him, and tried to give a small smile. “My apologies; it seems that my thoughts have taken a strange turn today. If you are amenable to it, I shall leave you alone to enjoy my library without the disturbance of my poor company.”

“I believe sir,” Madison said, leaning forward, “that you have little to worry about with regards to your legacy.” His fingers were half-clenched on top of his knees. How had Jefferson never noticed how small those hands were?

“You flatter me, sir,” he heard his own voice said.

“This is not idle flattery,” Madison corrected. “You have done a great deal for this country, sir.”

His mouth was twitched upwards on the corners.

“History would honour your accomplishments, and the light they shine would surely eclipse a matter such as this.”

Madison’s small hand drew out from where it was half-hid by his shirtsleeve. Smooth, cold fingertips brushed over Jefferson’s knuckles. 

The ghosts of tangled fingers at the edge of his vision. Broad hands with dark skin covering twitching muscle and bulging veins; covering blood as brilliant-dark as the apple of Eden, as oil-bright as his own as the roses grew and grew within his chest, tearing through muscle and veins to wrap around bones.

Apples and roses and heart’s blood. All red. All the colour of pain. All the precise shade of sin.

Jefferson dug his nails into the wood of his cane.

“If you trust in my foresight, sir, then you will surely believe my words to be true.”

He should feel happy, for Madison rarely even attempted to comfort him. Madison was not a cold man, only a rational one, preferring clean lines of solutions to the tangled threads of grief.

“There are matters which I cannot see,” Jefferson said, and widened his smile. “I am afraid that I am too enamoured by reason for such comforts.”

His residence was nearer to Washington’s designated meeting place than Madison’s; a mere few minutes away by carriage. He could already hear the horses slowing.

Madison’s smile faded. “Of course,” he said. Wisps of his wig shadowed his eyes as he bowed his head to stare at the floor.

Minutes passed. The carriage stopped. Jefferson heard the sound of footsteps slapping against pavement before the door opened. 

Jimmy stood there, his head still bowed. “Mister Jefferson, Mister Madison,” he murmured, and stepped aside.

Jefferson waited. After Madison had exited the carriage, he ducked down the steps as well. His cane smacked against the doorway.

Without needing to think, he tossed the thing for Jimmy to keep, and took his papers with his other hand. 

Then he followed Madison to the library.


	3. Chapter 3

_A strong wind at my back,_  
 _So I lift up the only sail that I have,_  
 _This tired white flag._  
      _Neptune,_ Sleeping at Last

The bed pushed against the wall reminded Jefferson of those in the slave huts tucked into the corners of his plantation. 

Still, there were differences: the pillow was too full; the comforter too heavy; the mattress sank beneath the body’s weight instead of being just a few thin sheets; it did not creak or rock with the lightest touch. And it belonged to Oak, in the same way the room in its entirety did. 

Slaves did not own anything that could be contained within four walls.

“You should’ve just skipped stage-door, y’know.” The _clink-thud_ of a heavy glass being set on the table. Weight and warmth settling down beside him, starting to become familiar after a mere few hours.

As the body lifted the glass and alcohol burned down its throat, Jefferson remembered the groups of young men and women outside the theatre. Skins of all shades, but mostly pale. One particular girl who held a rectangular screen ( _a phone_ ) up, the body’s own voice screeching through it. A mass of words, all so fast that it was all incomprehensible to Jefferson’s ghost-ears.

All he knew was that it was in English. This tongue that should be weighed down, too heavy to properly speak the language, was instead so swift that it flicked quick and swift, and gave rhythm to the words in ways Jefferson had never even thought possible. 

Fingers meant for rough work instead plucking the nerves of language itself to make it dance.

( _And you think that English ain’t made for us_.)

“It’s really okay,” the body said. When Oak reached out for it, it caught the hand with its own, turning its head to nuzzle against the smooth palm.

Rasp of beard over skin. Jefferson, without nerves, barely a ghost, could still feel them twist within.

This was not his body. Yet he felt what it felt.

“How ‘bout you distract me instead of worrying?”

Oak’s mouth against his, breath warm and shivery with laughter. Oak’s hand splayed over the back of his neck, nails scratching over the scalp. Thrumming heat that sparked and burst into flames beneath the skin, driving down, down, to the core where Jefferson was.

“You sure ‘bout this?”

Vision blurred by half-lidded eyes. Dirt against ebony. The squeak of mattress springs beneath shoulders far too broad and yet with every inch familiar after a day.

“Yeah.” Stubbled cheeks gathering heat. “We probably should shower first, but… that can wait ‘til morning.”

Red underneath skin too dark to be stained. Like soil watered by blood but never changing its hue.

Jefferson was a ghost, but he still had skin, and it was far too pale. And he knew. 

“You’re gross, you know that?” 

This was not his body. Yet he desired what it desired.

Broad shoulders hitting the mattress. It squeaked, protesting. Laughter breathed over skin that should be his. “Your bed is such a piece of shit.”

Soft brushes of fingers over hair that was far too thick and curled to be his, but was so easy to claim. As easy as it was to turn the light on. 

( _Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me_.) _  
_  
“Better than the air mattress you’ve got,” Oak said, and straddled the body’s hips. Thick thighs flexed before he settled, sinking. The body arched, arms rising, but a hand caught hold of wrists and pinned him down.

Nerves beneath skin rearing into life, reaching out, spreading ghostly arms within. Jefferson could not close his eyes, so he watched as the world shifted and tilted as he, too, settled, sinking down, down, and filled in spaces that were not left empty.

“Y’know… I wanna be a distraction. But I ain’t gonna start treating you rough ‘cause of that.” The touch over a thumb over one eye, then the other. “Y’know what I mean?”

Jefferson did not understand and did not want to. But he was water, and so he knew:

He opened the mouth that was his and not his. The flex of a throat felt so deep within, so intimate. Voices – ghost and real, person and body – joined in tandem:

“Just keep touching me.”

A hand splayed over the body’s chest, his chest. Heavy fingers tracing strong bones and corded muscles. “You keep talking like that, and a man’s gonna get a big head.” Lips quirked into a lopsided smirk.

Jefferson said, “That’s not the kind of touching I fucking meant, dammit,” mouth moving in the shapes of a secret language he could not fully understand.

Chuffed laughter against a bearded jaw. Nails that tugged on too-thin cloth. “All you said was _touching_ ,” Oak said, grinning so wide that his teeth caught the moon coming through the ragged curtains. “How am I supposed to know the kind of touching you meant?”

Sally lit by the morning Parisian sun. The light caught within the strands of her brown hair, the curls fully tamed for once. Splashes of gold across her shoulders, along her cheeks. The sun’s shadows teasing hints of ivory where the brown should be. 

Her back had been turned to him, then. The look of the spine was one he knew well, on another woman. The hint of a question mark; an opening parenthesis curved at the perfect angle to place his hand. A distraction, an invitation. Martha’s skin warm beneath him. Sally’s wide, wide eyes, her mouth having learned only stuttering. 

He had always known. Yet the language of bodies should be consistent, its forms unchanged. Just like the shapes of words should never be warped entirely by the tongues that wrapped around them.

“I want,” the body said, Jefferson said, “you to _touch_ me.” Long leg over thick waist, pulling close. Heel over the small of the back, fitting perfect against the dip of the spine.

Arch of the hips. Jefferson’s wide eyes, the body’s half-lidded ones, as flames burst from beneath the skin, concentrated between the legs.

“ _Here_ ,” Jefferson hissed, the body hissed. Another arch, hips turned to rocking. Filth made into motion. “Touch me here, dammit.”

Oak’s hands on his shoulders. He shook his head, and tapped him light on the jaw with one finger. “Told you that I ain’t gonna go rough on you just ‘cause you want a distraction.”

“What if I want instead for you to go rough?” Jefferson asked with the body’s voice.

Martha’s parted lips, her breath escaping shallow and quick with the barest touch. The slow slide of her body against white sheets in the morning, and the butterfly-flutters of her lashes. Her skin pale as porcelain, bruising when touched with anything but the gentlest fingertips. Parasol to hide from the blazing Virginian sun, gloves whenever out of the shade.

Sally beside her. Thinner wrists and smaller hands, but with her skin gleaming gold. Metal yielded to heat. The press of the nail left imprints easily rubbed away.

And Madison. Madison with the smallness of his wrist, the thinness of his hands, set into such sharp relief against the unfurled silk-blooms of his cuffs. Madison, so terribly sickly.

“Think it’s long past time you stop talking, then,” Oak said. Moonlight sliding over his cheekbones. Eyes too dark to catch the streaks of sunrise. Searing yellow lights setting gems to the backs of his hands. The turn of his head at the call of Madison’s name. The skin of his neck glimmering like obsidian, like ebony.

Elbow resting over his throat, the body’s throat. Every breath pushing against muscle and bone. Pure solidity.

Intimacies.

This was not his body but he wanted it to be his. Not for his body but all that surrounded him.

Vestiges of echoes that faded before his ears could catch them. His mouth had moved without his knowing, and Oak was laughing again. His hand against Jefferson’s cheek, stroking over the curve, before sliding down the arm to close around the fingers. Full lips crushed over knuckles in a gentle kiss.

The colours should be stark, bifurcating. Yet his half-lidded eyes blurred the lines, melded them together.

Pale palms. If he focused, he could blur the edges where the darkness bled in.

“Like this,” Oak said, and brought their hands downwards. 

Jefferson did not know these buttons, or these strange rasping metal teeth ( _seriously, c’mon, that’s just a zip_ ). It was muscle memory that had him pulling leather strip out of metal buckle; merely instinct that had him slipping a hand into the heavy, scratchy blue cloth to scrape over thin cotton.

He thrust his hand directly into burning heat. Hot enough to scorch down to the very bones. 

Dante wrote of the flames of hell and the pains they brought upon those who sinned. But he had not said, not even once, how pain could crawl up from the hand, and flood the mouth with Eden’s honey.

No, there was no flood at all. Waters should not be so thick and limber; should not lick over teeth and gums like this. There were only flames, spreading down his twitching stomach to flick over the insides of his thighs. Sinking, seeping, drowning him in the sweetness of the first taste of temptation, coiling with its multitudes of tongues around the coiling, stiffening knot within.

Red like pain. Red like sin. Red like desire.

This was not his body. _This was not his body_.

A cry escaped his throat into Oak’s mouth. A tremulous, half-formed thing, as much ghost as it was body.

“Don’t know what got into you today.” Flames that spread dew on his cheeks. “But damned do I love it when you react like this just for me.”

Dew that burned and cooled. Dew that weighed down his eyes and surrounded him in darkness that echoed with a voice.

A voice with depth like the leavings on a pan after sugars had been refined. Like the drips of ink left in the pot after almost all of it had been used. Streaking and staining.

Jefferson’s fingers twitched. He drowned in flames that welded his ghost-form to too-real nerves that rested beneath solid, too-dark skin.

( _Be careful when you take what you know doesn’t belong to you_.)

Thick waist between his trembling thighs. Hard muscles that did not belong underneath well-made roofs.

( _Then again, people like you never realised when something isn’t yours_.)

His eyes were forced open. Flat nose, thick lips. Bright eyes that burned with flames so strong they caressed over his skin. Glimmering ebony that turned at the call of Madison’s name.

“ _Daveed_.”

Flames that no longer caressed but pierced. Hooks that pierced his chest and sank into his heart, to his very core. Fire with fingers that wrapped around the metal, turning it searing-red, and _pulled_.

A cry ricocheted around him. Wordless, it was a ghost sound with too much form. Solidity made from the splatters of red as his heart’s blood spilled and sprayed from his throat. 

***

Madison standing at the doorway of his study, small body fitting perfectly within the crisscrossing sunlight that came through the rooms’ windows.

“I have been terrible company,” Jefferson said. “My apologies.”

He drew his hands out from where they had been hidden underneath the desk, and closed the fingers of one around a quill. The tip of it was still pristine white.

Brown eyes rested on him. After a day in Philadelphia’s humidity and wind, Madison’s wig had become dishevelled, some of the coarse strands falling over his face with streaks of white powder over his cheekbones. Jefferson could almost imagine him seated in the library, head bowed over a book and impatiently brushing the wig and powder out of his eyes without care of consequences.

There had been many occurrences of such a thing. That was why he remembered.

“You have no need to entertain me, sir,” Madison murmured eventually. “I have intruded enough already on a day when you surely would rather spend by yourself.”

A day he had spent with his empty desk. With half-formed ghosts and half-ghost forms that circled him, their words distorted into the distant cawing that reminded Jefferson of vultures crowing over a desecrated corpse.

Standing up, he placed the quill back into its stand, and headed for the doorway. “Mrs Madison must be awaiting you for dinner,” he said. The smile came unbidden, now. “Let me see you to the door.”

“There is no such need,” Madison protested, but his shoulders were already turning. 

If Jefferson was a fanciful man, he would imagine that there were threads that tied their bodies together, forcing Madison’s body to mirror his own movements. Threads like metal welded onto fingers or necks; threads like roots sunk deep into the soul.

But Madison was far too solid. The early evening sun cast long shadows upon the floor.

“Sir,” Madison said.

Jimmy had been holding the door open, head half-lifted with expectancy. Beside him, Sally’s hands stretched out, Madison’s black coat stark against her fingers of burnished gold. They bowed their heads in unison.

Before Madison could continue, Jefferson heard himself say, “Have I ever told you the efforts I made to change the penalties for sodomy?”

Madison started. Jefferson could not blame him; the thought had been so sudden that he surprised himself. He swallowed.

“No,” Madison said. The furrows of his brow forced shadows to gather between the creased skin. “You have not, sir.”

“Castration instead of death,” Jefferson murmured. “For ‘others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.’” 

“The Book of Jude,” Madison inclined his head. His lips spread into a smile, and he shook his head. “Your kindness shows once more, sir.”

Jefferson jerked, threads tugging at his nerves. He carefully did not clench his hands.

“You have quoted the twenty-third verse of the book,” Madison said. “But on the twenty-first, it said, ‘Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ.’”

Reaching out, he took Jefferson’s hand into his much smaller ones.

“Is it not kinder to deliver them directly into God’s hands instead of causing a lifetime of pain?” His skin was so cold, and his soft smile ignited such fire. “For they have spotted not only the garments, but their very flesh. Flesh could never be cleansed. Not wholly.”

He cocked his head, obviously waiting. Jefferson tugged his mouth up into a smile even as the vultures’ cawing grew louder and louder in that strange, distorted space of his mind.

“Of course,” he said. His head bobbed down without grace; a sudden weight as strings were snapped. “Such mercy is but cruelty in another form.”

“What turned your mind to this matter?”

Ghosts and forms, and the blurring of the lines between. Dirt and ebony, and the red that ran underneath. The touch of skin, his own hands erasing the clean lines that divided Madison’s wrist from his sleeve.

“Merely a passing thought,” Jefferson lied. Another weight that he must shoulder on his eventual downward trek, but one so light as to be easily dismissed. “Nothing you must fret about, sir.”

“We must continue this discussion on another day,” Madison said. His hand shifted, fingers slipping beneath Jefferson’s sleeve. Nails scraped ghost-light over the thin skin that stretched over his bones. “Unfortunately…”

Jefferson jerked his head again. “Mrs Madison awaits,” he said, and untangled their fingers.

Madison looked at him for a moment before he turned away. Sally stepped forward then, holding out his coat, and he slipped his arms into it. As he headed down the steps, Jefferson dug into his pockets for the thick envelope he had stowed into it – the papers that would allow Jimmy to walk on Philadelphia’s streets unaccompanied by – and handed it to Jimmy. Jimmy bowed, and turned.

Streaks of the setting sun upon Madison’s skin, ivory-white. Streaks upon Jimmy’s, brown like raw wood. Red splashed and splayed upon both, like skin had been stripped away to reveal the blood beneath.

“Sally,” Jefferson said, watching as Madison stepped into his carriage, “hold out your hands.”

It was the back of his own that Madison had touched, so Jefferson took Sally’s hands into his with only his palms touched hers. He dragged her – she was strangely incalcitrant – towards the doorway, and held out her hands to the light.

Red and gold, shimmering like richly woven threads. He placed his thumb on her pulse to feel the rushing torrent of it.

Molten gold that yielded beneath the touch of hands. No bark, no roots. No dirt. Closer to porcelain than to strength.

“Sir,” Sally said. Jefferson opened his fingers to watch her hands drop, sack-like, to her sides.

“I have no appetite for dinner tonight,” he said, and turned away from her.

“What shall we do with the food, sir?”

“Give it to the poor,” Jefferson said, and waved a hand. “Don’t disturb me for the rest of the night.”

He headed up to his study. The door closed and he nearly tripped over his own feet in his rush to sit behind the desk. 

There were no marks of Madison’s touch on his skin; he was gentle, the smooth pads of his fingertips barely with enough form to convince Jefferson that it was not a dream. Jefferson splayed his hand on top of the desk, staring at the back.

Long years of holding a quill had made the green veins stand out amidst the pale. 

( _C’mon. No one is watching_.)

The eyes of God that watched all that the sun touched, all that the darkness cast its blanket over. Jefferson turned his wrist over. There was a prominent green vein that ran right over his pulse point, and it throbbed in between his every breath.

( _This is the closest you’ll ever be able to get._ )

Blood underneath as red as the apple of Eden; as red as temptation. Temptation that ruined and stained by thought alone, for to think was to desire, and desire had form enough to stain. He rolled up his sleeves to scrape nails over the length of the arm.

This body was his. And yet he still felt another, curled deep within. Formless yet with presence as solid and strong as the shadow that stretched out beneath him.

( _Don’t you want to see?_ )

Buttons slipped out of their holes. Cloth peeled apart like leaves being pushed aside, like blossoms unfurling under the morning sun to set thorns into sharp relief.

There was no colour; only a paleness with spots of dark red hairs. Like blood that had dried and seeped into skin. Temptation made permanent, never properly recognised until now.

Madison had touched the back of his hands. Jefferson twisted his wrists to press those fortunate spots of skin against his shaft. Sunlight spilling red over himself. 

He did not close his eyes and yet the ghosts came to haunt anyway. Entangled hands, palm to palm, fingers clenching tight enough that bone showed stark even through bark-dark skin. A broad chest lining up against his own, the weight heavy enough to squeeze breath out of his skin as his throat clenched uselessly around nothing.

( _You don’t really want him. Not really._ )

Small hands with weak bones that belied their strength. A head that turned at the call of a familiar name. Eyes that lit up in recognition not only under blaring yellow lights powered by something Jefferson could not name, but under moonlight and candlelight. Eyes that could catch a flint’s sparks at the moment stone struck tinder.

“ _James_.”

A familiar, forbidden name. Jefferson’s hips jerked. 

When Eve first bit into the apple, surely its sticky juices had burst into being inside her mouth and slid down her throat. Sweeter than anything she had ever tasted. Burst of red twisted and distorted into pain for the years and generations that came after her.

For Jefferson, there was only bitter metal from his own thin lips. Only the twitch of his shaft against the back of his hands. Sour-twisting salt in the air. Splash of white on his abdomen, over the bleached, starched cotton of his shirt.

Reaching up, he pulled the cravat he had left knotted on his throat. White creased with shadows, but easily smoothed out against the desk. The white of his own release did not stain the cloth; only blocked the sunlight’s from shining through the threads.

( _Feel better?_ )

Blood dripped onto the cloth, seeping into white. His lip had stopped bleeding already so Jefferson picked up the small knife meant for cutting quills. The blade followed the line of the vein at the back of his hand; a line following the touch of one of Madison’s fingers.

Now it was far too red.

Ink still left in the pot. Jefferson stained his fingers and rubbed it against the cloth. 

But the colours did not mix. There was only a canvas of red and white and black, the edges neatly defined. No matter how hard he rubbed against the lines, they would not blur. He only opened the wound on the back of his hand further, blood dripping, seeping and sinking deep.

Devouring.

Jefferson closed his eyes. He lifted the cloth and pressed it to his face. He breathed in deep.

But those ghost hands, tangled together, remained out of reach.

( _I can’t believe that we are free_.)

Laughter, loud and cackling and familiar. A cadence to his own hitching, breaking breaths.

Deep within him, deeper than the voice that he wished was his own, Jefferson heard the sound of porcelain shattering.

The first time they had met, Betty Hemings had dropped her cup and saucer. Pieces of white that were left shattered on the ground, stark against darkwood floors.

Bright against her fingertips. 

_End_

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in the midst of rather intense turmoil in my personal life. It was half-deliberate – I scheduled myself to write it during that time. I did not, however, expect things to have turned out this incredibly fucked up. At this point I’m not even surprised anymore; I seem to specialise in this kind of shit.
> 
> To everyone reading this: thank you so much for taking a chance with it, and I really hope that it was… a good kind of experience, if nothing else.


End file.
